Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac (b. 1922–d. 1969) was a novelist and poet whose bestselling novel On the Road is considered an American classic. Born Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac to working-class French-Canadian parents in Lowell, Massachusetts, a mill town that suffered economic difficulties even before the Great Depression, he spoke French as his first language. A standout athlete in high school, Kerouac enrolled in Columbia University in 1940 on a football scholarship. He left Columbia during his sophomore year and served for two years in the Merchant Marine and six months in the Navy before being discharged on medical grounds by reason of “indifferent character.” In the mid- to late 1940s he met Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Neal Cassady, John Clellon Holmes, and other key figures in what became known as the Beat Generation, a phrase Kerouac coined. While he worked on his first published novel, The Town and the City (1950), he traveled extensively across the United States; these travels provided the material for his second and best-known novel, On the Road (1957), the novel that made him famous but also notorious as a countercultural figure, leading to belittlement of his literary skills. He had written six novels before the publication of On the Road made him a celebrity, and these books were brought out quickly after its success. Kerouac drew from experiences in his own adventurous life and from the exploits of his friends; thus, like Jack London, he became as famous for his romantic adventures as for his literary output. Kerouac planned his work—novels, poems, and nonfiction books—as a loosely arranged series that contributed to his life’s story that he called the Duluoz Legend. Their congested publication plus Kerouac’s claim that he composed them quickly, without revision, led Truman Capote to quip that his novels were not writing; they were typewriting. In addition, social observers attacked Kerouac for encouraging an ethic of recklessness and nihilism among young people. Kerouac’s life spiraled into a tragic drunken spree, and he died at age forty-seven of complications resulting from alcoholism. As the years passed, Kerouac has been recognized as an innovative literary artist who developed new styles of expression in prose and poetry, and his development of a “spontaneous prose” style is placed alongside other artistic achievements in the 1950s, such as Jackson Pollack’s “action painting” and Charlie Parker’s bebop jazz. Kerouac remains a popular writer outside the curriculum even as On the Road is regularly assigned in the classroom.